Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Eco-Leviathan Rangeland Management: Lock It Up, Burn It Down -- Then Blame the Ranchers

When one says of Don Barnhill that a given challenge
confronting him is “not his first rodeo,” the expression is not a wearisome cliché.
Rodeo championships figure prominently in Barnhill’s life, which is cluttered
with enviable achievements.

As a younger man he was a private firefighter, which means
that he actually worked to contain and defeat fires, rather than maximizing
expense while minimizing results, which is the government sector approach. He pursued
a degree in archeology and is a self-taught historian of the Oregon Trail who
helped organize the first reenactment of the Three
Island Crossing on the Snake River. He also helped organize a cowboy poetry
association, and built roughly a dozen successful businesses.

For decades, Barnhill related to me in a voice heavy with
weary amusement, the WWP dispatched eager college students to canvass Oywhee
County, and other parts of rural Idaho, in search of a suitably charismatic “endangered
species” whose welfare could be invoked as a pretext for banishing ranchers
from its “habitat.” Various kinds of “threatened” frogs and flora frustrated
that design by perversely thriving in the presence of cattle and the humans who
manage them. The WWP eventually settled on the sage grouse, and persuaded a complaisant
BLM into designating that unremarkable bird as a “sensitive species.”

Which is the real Commie? Winmill, seen here with an ex-Soviet Judge.

Following a long-established script, the WWP rewarded – I do
not use that verb ironically – the BLM by filing a lawsuit in 2008 demanding
the revocation of grazing permits across 40 million acres throughout Idaho and
Nevada. “Forcing” a federal agency to expand its power is roughly as difficult
as trying to prompt Donald Trump to say something nice about himself, but
appearances must be maintained. Thus the BLM, in the fashion of Byron’s Julia (“I
shall ne’er consent,” she sighed, while consenting to her seducer), went
through the motions of resisting the WWP’s demands. In the parlance of pro
wrestling, this lawsuit, like all others of its kind, was a “work,” not a “shoot.”

Like other foundation-funded eco-jihadist groups, the WWP has “routinely used
the federal Equal Access to Justice Act … to recover their attorney fees from these
lawsuits,” explains
Chris Brong, a 33-year veteran of the BLM, US Forest Service, and Fish and
Wildlife Service who is now a Commissioner in Washington’s Skamania County. “Most
of the federal judges hearing these cases, with little or no background [in]
federal land management laws or policies, have been very sympathetic to the
[eco-radical groups” and entirely hostile toward the people who are making a
productive living on lands that should be privately owned, rather than being
locked up by the Feds without constitutional authority.

Eventually the WWP’s sage grouse lawsuit wound up before US District Judge Lynn
Winmill, whose
courtroom is where justice goes to die. Again, that expression is to be
treated literally. Fifteen years ago the WWP
filed a lawsuit against an elderly Idaho rancher named Verl Jones, claiming
that by exercising his water rights to grow hay he had harmed the habitat of
the “endangered” bull trout, despite the fact that none were found in the area.
Without bothering to ask the WWP to show evidence in support of its claims,
Winmill ruled in favor of the WWP, ordered Jones to stop irrigating his fields,
and pay the WWP’s legal fees.

Predictably, Jones lost his crop, and his ranch. Stolidly
indifferent to the plight of the financially ruined 85-year-old man, Winmill
allowed the WWP to raid the victim’s remaining assets, which were sold off to
pay the syndicate’s legal expenses. Jones, who had been hardy and healthy
despite his years, succumbed to stress and passed away.

With respect to the WWP’s demand to shut down ranching throughout
Idaho and Nevada, Winmill
disgorged what he probably considered to be a Solomonic ruling: Rather than
cleaving the baby with a sword, he would strangle it incrementally. Thus the
BLM was ordered to undertake a series of time-intensive revisions to the
management of grazing allotments that had been purchased by private ranchers –
which included new restrictions regarding where, and for how long, they could
graze their livestock.

Don Barnhill received notification of these new requirements
in the March 8, 2013 letter containing the application for his annual grazing
permit.

None of the permit holders had been consulted about the changes
demanded by the BLM; each of them was expected to tug on his forelock and obey.

Barnhill, like every other affected rancher, knew that he had
no alternative to offering “concurrence and formal agreement” to the
WWP-dictated terms. He was determined, however, to make a record of his
objections to what was being required of him – if only to absolve himself of
the inevitable consequences of allowing vegetation that would have been
devoured by cattle to become irresistible tinder for a devastating range fire.

“I agree to follow the grazing management and objectives
outlined above,” Barnhill explained in a
postscript he inserted into the application. However, he continued, “I sign
this document under protest. The terms and conditions imposed by this permit
will do nothing to improve the habitat for the Sage Grouse or any other
wildlife. These changes … serve only to appease the court and the anti-grazing
extremist organization that filed suit. In the long run these changes will
greatly increase the potential for a catastrophic fire that would destroy the
range AND the habitat for Sage Grouse for many years to come. If such a fire occurs, the responsibility
lies solely with the BLM and the Federal court that forced this action”
(emphasis added).

Barnhill presented the revised application, with the check
for his annual grazing fee, to Chandler, who rejected it. When Barnhill
insisted, pointing out that there were witnesses who had seen him present the
application and the required fee, Chandler excused herself and went into her
office.

“She was in there for no more than two or three minutes, before coming out and
saying, `I just got off the phone with the Solicitor General, and he told me I
cannot accept that document,” Barnhill told me, chuckling at the absurdity of
the claim.

Barnhill requested that Chandle append a signed statement on
his revised application reflecting her transparently false claim – which,
astonishingly, she did. In addition to documenting the casual dishonesty of
the BLM’s local commissarina, the application made Barnhill’s predictions about
a WWP-engineered, and BLM-abetted, range fire part of the legal record.

Last summer, the desiccated foliage that the WWP had
lovingly cultivated provided the fuel for the Soda Creek Fire, a conflagration that
ravaged the better part of 300,000 acres throughout Owyhee County.

“We have a bunch of people making decisions on wildlife,
habitat, grazing and land management, and they have no practical experience,”
complained Alan Davis, owner of Graybell Farms – located not that far from the
BLM’s Marsing office – after the fire was finally contained. “If you leave this
land alone, the Russian thistle is going to take over. When it continues to
compound year after year, it stays standing up until something eats it, or [it]
burns.”

“If the Bureau of Land Management is not going to take an
active management role … then they need to get the heck out of the way and let
ranchers or somebody else take care of the land,” Davis summarized.

“The BLM’s approach to `recovery’ from fires is to require
ranchers to `rest’ affected areas for at least five years,” Barnhill explained
to me. At the same time, the agency will require ranchers to “suspend” a growing
portion of their “animal unit months” – a measurement of the time they are
allowed to graze their livestock. This will increase the attrition rate in the
industry, remorselessly advancing the WWP’s design of driving ranchers into
extinction.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast goes into further detail regarding the BLM, the WWP, and the eco-jihad in the Western States:

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3 comments:

I kind of have mixed feelings about this one; especially when it comes to noting the feds egregious violation of requiring states consent to convert to federal land per our constitution's article one:

"To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings..."

In which case dishonest federalist jurists and legislators overlooked a natural cession of territorial rights to the people of the states subsequently created from those (formerly) federal territories; in case of states created post constitutional adoption and rule of law.

But if we are going to invoke constitutional 'principles', there are prior claimants per article six:

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding"

In which case it could be stated the real 'welfare queens' of Oregon are the ranchers who stuck it to the Indians in gross violation of our constitution's mandated behavior; with the able assistance of the feds and a question with actual relevance in the present dispute could be 'et tu Brute?' or that is to say who is sticking it to who here? Should this question be proposed by the sovereign people of Oregon of the fed? In the case of these former partners in crime, it seems apropos but let's not lose sight of the larger context and a pair of prior citations: 'As you sow, so shall you reap' & 'He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations"

Zero sympathy from here, nil, zip. The Oregon ranchers are just getting a bit of luck which has been long deserved, and the nastiness they are confronting now is of an identical heritage they'd taken advantage of; in their former alliance with the fed when coveting lands neither party have legitimate right to -

Excellent! This story offers more sound proof that people whom have nothing to offer the private sector in any degree in a quid pro quo for their services and or abilities. Being said, these people flock to government for their livelihood and somehow through serious mental health issues, self create huge egos which they believe they are better and smarter that the citizens. This is fact and this country has many millions of such people destroying this country from the inside outward. This matter of government employed parasites, has even created situations that are openly being discussed, where government is planning to seize private retirement funds, 401k's, union retirement funds and so on. This is said to be on the table to save unfounded government employees retirement funds. Government employees, many of which are unionized have grown to such a power that citizens are being thrown under the bus for the advancement of government employed parasites who offer nothing, not even a hint of serving the citizens of America. Government employment on all levels of government is a terminal cancer that is rotting a once great and wonderful country into nothing that even resembles what this country once was. This story only shows a very little window of how ridiculous and the stupity that government has become on so many levels today.

America at its best. This won't stop until the USA is taken over by a foreign power. I don't mind that since an invading force won't even bother pretending to give a rip about any governing documents like our traitorous govt leeches. I only hope that before they kill me I get to watch them butcher a sea of govt parasites who will be in shock in wondering how they the elite are not crucial to this new overlords rule?

The citizens told the Lord Jesus to leave the US alone and by golly He did and this is our just desserts.